Buck v. Bell

Buck v. Bell was a 1927 US Supreme Court case which ruled that compulsory sterilization of the unfit did not violate the Due Process clause fo the Fourteenth Amendment. The case originated with Virginia's 1924 sterilization law (which sterilized anyone who was feeble-minded, an imbecile, or epileptic), influenced by the eugenics movement, which resulted in Carrie Buck being sterilized in 1927. Carrie Buck's mother Emma Buck was deemed feeble-minded and sexually promiscuous, and she was involuntarily institutionalized, and Carrie was committed to the same asylum after giving birth to an illegitimate daughter. The case of Buck went to the Supreme Court, but Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that it would be better for the world if society could prevent those who were manifestly unfit from continuing their kind of "imbeciles". Although the definitions of imbecile and feeble-minded were arbitrary and meaningless, the Supreme Court decided that the sterilization program was not unconstitutional, and sterilization laws came to be adopted in several other states. In addition, sterilization spread through the world, and, in 1938, hospital director Joseph S. DeJamette expressed his disappointment that, while Nazi Germany in six years sterilized about 80,000 people, the US only sterilized 27,000, and that the USA should do more to increase sterilizations.